An actual coverage range of a cell (or a base station) is determined by factors in many aspects, including a carrier frequency, receiver performance of a terminal, and the like. When cell planning is being performed, on one hand, a carrier frequency is considered, and on the other hand, a network is deployed with reference to a channel environment and receiver performance of a terminal. For example, in a network that has been established or a network that is to be planned to be established, large-scale fading characteristics of most terminals (UE) are similar, and in this case, within a coverage range of a cell, all these most terminals can be served. However, if a few terminals are also within a distance of the coverage range of the cell but have fading characteristics relatively different from those of the most terminals, consequently, when a signal reaches these terminals, receive power is particularly low (for example, below sensitivity of a receiver), and these terminals cannot implement communication. For example, compared with an overground terminal, energy or power, of a terminal in a basement, for receiving a signal is 10 to 20 dB lower.
To enable a terminal in a harsh environment to be covered and served by an existing cell as well, enhanced sending needs to be performed on information that is on a physical channel and is to be received by the terminal in the harsh environment. For different physical channels, enhanced sending methods may be slightly different, but a basic enhancement method is: repeatedly sending, at a predefined resource location, information on a physical channel, so that a peer receiver can receive and combine multiple sent duplicates, thereby improving receiving performance. The predefined resource location herein refers to a predefined extra resource except for a resource used when normal physical channel information is sent. Because there are a relatively small quantity of UE in a harsh environment, when a network status is busy, a network has the right to choose not to serve the UE in the harsh environment, that is, choose to disable a coverage enhancement mode, only by which effective use of a frequency spectrum can be ensured and that ordinary UE with a high priority is preferentially served can be ensured.
In the prior art, to enable UE to learn whether a current cell supports coverage enhancement, a base station determines whether a preset condition to start an enhancement scheme is met. If the condition is met, the base station communicates with a terminal according to a predetermined resource that is to be used in the enhancement scheme; or the base station negotiates, in a dynamic configuration manner, with the terminal about a resource that is to be used in the enhancement scheme, and communicates with the terminal according to the resource that is to be used in the enhancement scheme.
However, in the prior art, a base station considers by default that a network currently supports a coverage enhancement mode, and therefore the base station cannot indicate an actual support status of the coverage enhancement mode to UE.